First Time: Penny's Story (First Time (Penny) Book 1) (7 page)

“
It’s my clock tower,” he
said.

He couldn’t mean… “You live in there?” Before
he could answer, I jumped the gun and added, “That’s so cool!”

He nodded, clearly
downplaying the awesomeness of living inside a clock. If
I
lived in a clock tower,
I would introduce myself that way. My business cards would say,
“Penelope Parker, clock tower dweller.” If I had any business
cards. No, actually, I would
get
business cards, just to put that on
them.

“
I would love to see it,
sometime,” I blurted, before I could remember how rude it was to
assume an invitation. “You know…if you’re cool with
that.”

“
I think I could be very
cool with that.” But as he said it, his gaze shifted, like he was
seeing something very grim happening just slightly in the future.
And it wasn’t momentary; it was like he’d completely checked
out.

“
Ian?” I asked, though I
felt like I was somehow intruding by interrupting what appeared to
be a thoughtful moment.

He snapped back to himself and looked a
little sheepish. “Sorry.”

Judging from past experience—our singular
past experience—I was pretty sure Ian was tense about our date. And
last time, a pretty large portion of that had been caused by the
internet. “You seem really tense. You weren’t reading a bunch of
bad dating advice again, were you?”

He couldn’t hide anything
with that face of his. “I may have done. You should be impressed.
Do you know how difficult it is to find
second
date advice?”

I leaned forward, like I was telling him a
secret. “You made it to the second date. That means whatever you
did on the first date was fine.”

“
Was it? I don’t know these
things. I’m rubbish when it comes to dating.” He looked so lost I
was starting to feel really sorry for him. But I wanted to laugh at
him, too. He had way more life experience—and way more romantic
experience—than I had, but he was more nervous than I was. Maybe
ignorance really was bliss, then?

I reached into my purse for my phone. “You’re
doing fine. But where are you getting your advice?” Nah, we needed
a more decisive plan of action. “Never mind. I’ll look it up. What
did you google?”

I hadn’t thought he could have looked any
more embarrassed, but he went from the color of pink Starburst to
the color of a red Solo cup and mumbled, “‘Dating don’ts for
men.’”

“
Don’ts”. Not “do’s” for how
to get a chick in bed with you. Not “how to trick a woman into
having sex”. At least, not that he was admitting. The results
loaded, and I turned the screen out to him. “Which one?”

He hesitated before tapping on the first
link. “Why are you so interested in this?”

Because I’m a genius.
“Because. We are going to break every single one
of these rules.” I bit my lip as I read the list. Maybe it wasn’t
the greatest idea. The very first one was about money, and that
subject made me more panicky than a cat on a car ride. But it
wouldn’t be fair if we just went over all of the stuff that made
him uncomfortable. “That way, you wouldn’t be so nervous
anymore.”

“
Ah, because the worst will
have already occurred.” He still seemed reluctant, which was good,
because then I could pretend to be full of bravado about the whole
process.

I stared at “don’t talk
about money” while I chewed another bite of sandwich and tried to
bolster my courage.
Look at me! I’m brave!
Fearless! I’ve got everything figured out!
I lied to myself as I read the first one. “‘Don’t talk about
money.’ Okay. Ian, I make thirty thousand dollars a
year.”

Whether he was surprised by how much or how
little that was, I couldn’t tell. Maybe he just hadn’t expected me
to give him my annual salary like that. He responded, “I, uh… I
make three hundred.”

“
Three hundred thousand a
year? I thought architects made like eighty or something.”
No. No, no, no.
Now he
would know I’d researched his salary. Personally, I felt like that
should be acceptable for anybody who was agreeing to go on a date
with anyone else, but other people hadn’t been raised with the
money weirdness I had. I probably looked like I was fishing for
marital assets. It was better to be upfront about it than try to
cover it up and dig a bigger hole. “This sounds so nosy of me, but
I looked it up.”

“
No, it’s fine. That’s one
of the first questions anyone asks me, anyway. After, ‘so, uh, do
you like, draw buildings and stuff?’” He finished his sentence in a
surprisingly good imitation of an American stoner. “I’m a partner
at our firm, and we do big ticket commercial work. It’s not the
average salary.”

I wondered if I should try to compliment him
about how successful he was, but that seemed tacky. Was it tacky?
To people who hadn’t been raised with money as a primary focus of
their life? “You’re doing better than me, at any rate. Okay, next
on the list…” Yikes. Whose bright idea had this one been? “It’s
‘Don’t bring up the b-word.’ I assume they mean babies and not
Beetlejuice?”

“
You want them, right?” he
asked, and before I could get offended at his wild assumption that,
as a woman,
of course
I would want babies, I remembered he’d probably talked to
Sophie about that.

“
Yup,” I confirmed. “And
Sophie said you did?”

“
I do. In fact, that could
lead us into number four. It’s why my ex-wife and I divorced.” He
took another bite, like he could cover up the bitterness in his
sentence with the salty, buttery amazingness of the
sandwich.

It probably would work.

But the fact that he remembered what number
four was, off the top of his head? That made me want to hug him and
promise everything was going to be okay for him. Instead, I said,
“Yikes,” and tried to move us into more cheerful territory. “Well,
how many do you want to have?”

“
Ex-wives?”

I rolled my eyes. “Kids. How many kids do you
want?”

Having heard all about his giant family, I
was relieved when he said, “Not as many as my parents had. Three or
four, at most. But I’d be happy with just one. You?”

“
Three, I think. Any more
than that and they can overpower you.” Not that I would
know.

“
Isn’t that the truth? About
when, do you think, you’d like to have kids?”

The question shocked me with
the realization that, hey, I might be talking to the guy I ended up
having kids with. And he might be talking to the future mother of
his children, too. I managed a squeaky little sigh to let off some
of the giddy pressure and tried to come up with an answer that
didn’t sound too much like
now, right
now.
“I’m still really young, and I know
that. But I want to have my kids young. Within the next two to
three years.”

There. That would give us a while to figure
it out.

He smiled. “Well, it would never work out
between us. I was going to wait another fifteen years.”

“
Oh, shut up,” I said,
laughing. But he hadn’t answered the question, and he was
fifty-three years old. Even if everything worked out perfectly
between us, I didn’t want to be having my first baby with my
seventy-year-old husband. “But seriously, that’s a pretty important
one. If we ended up…”

“
You’re right, it is
important.” Most of the time we’d spent together, Ian had been
affable and charming in the way that people were affable and
charming when they were first getting to know someone. But now, he
turned serious, and I appreciated that; if the topic split up him
and his wife, he clearly didn’t want to make any future mistakes
where this was concerned. “I would say that if something were to
work out, and I were to find myself in a committed relationship
within the next year or so, and things were just right… I’d be
ready to start. I’m not getting any younger. I just turned
fifty-three in July, so the clock is ticking.”

Within the next year or so didn’t seem quite
so far away when it was the time frame for a major life change like
having kids. And it was weirdly pleasing to know Ian was able to
accept that as a possible eventuality for us without running away
screaming.

But speaking of running away screaming…

There was nothing so
disappointing as reaching this part of the getting-to-know-you
stage only to have everything fall apart, but it had happened to me
more times than not. And while I’d sometimes used my virginity as a
handy excuse to ditch dates I wasn’t interested in, I
was
interested in Ian. But
number five was coming up.

It was now or never.

“
Okay, we talked about
number four,” I said, a sick feeling rising in my stomach and
threatening to spoil that lovely sandwich. “So, let’s go on to
number five. ‘Don’t talk about sex.’”

“
We just did, in a
roundabout way. Unless you don’t know where babies come from. In
which case, I have some shocking news for you,” he said, like we
were both in on the joke somehow.

Oh, if he thought
he
had shocking
news…

“
Look, Ian. I have to tell
you something, and it might be a deal breaker.”

“
All right. I suppose if it
is, this is only our second date, so it’s better to find out, now?”
His reasoning was the same as mine. That didn’t make it suck any
less that chances were high he’d be getting up and walking
away.

Rip it off like a Band-Aid.
And it won’t even be pathetic if you go home and
cry
. I took a deep breath and said, “I’m a
virgin.”

Chapter Five

“
I’m sorry, what?”

My face was hot, and not just because it was
a sunny day in August. “I’ve never had sex with anyone.”

Ian’s “Huh,” had to be one of the most
infuriatingly obtuse reactions I’d ever experienced.

Huh? What did he mean
by
huh?
What was I
supposed to think he meant by it?

Then he said the awful thing that so many
guys had said, right before they realized I wasn’t joking and I
could see them becoming visibly uncomfortable: “Well, I hope this
isn’t a deal breaker, but I’m not.”

I knew I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up,
but disappointment came crashing down on me hard. I didn’t have the
grace to be kind when I felt like the wind had been knocked out of
me. “You have no idea how often I hear that.”

“
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to
offend you.” He did look sorry, and that helped soften the blow a
bit. But I’d gotten the I’m-not-a-virgin joke from enough guys that
I knew what it meant. The next thing Ian asked would be…

“
Do you mind if I ask why?”
It was like he had a script.

I summoned up a gentle, Zen-like patience.
“No, I don’t mind. The why is, I haven’t found anyone yet that I
wanted to have sex with. I’m not super religious, or waiting for
marriage or anything. I’ll just know when it’s the right guy.” And
that was that. I couldn’t sugar coat it, and I wasn’t about to bend
or apologize. Or tell him it was because of a family superstition.
That would only make me look ditzy as hell. Instead, I shrugged and
told him, “If you can’t handle that in a relationship, I
understand. That’s where my ex-boyfriend went. I think he saw
himself as being able to conquer my virginity.”

It sucked that, because I hadn’t felt
comfortable or ready to have sex yet, I had to be so defensive
about a choice that was mine and mine alone. There had been
guys—Ian definitely did not seem like one of them—who felt like my
acceptance of a second date, or a third, had been false
advertising. Or they wanted me to feel grateful to them, that they
would accept such an unreasonable restriction. Brad had been one of
those guys.

“
He sounds like a shitty
boyfriend.”

Had Ian read my mind? I froze in place for
just a blink.

He must have taken that as a sign of offense,
because he said, “I’m sorry, that was uncalled for.”

Uncalled for or not, it was nice to hear it
verified by an independent party. “No, you’re right. He was a
shitty boyfriend. It just took me a while to see it.”

Was the same thing happening with Ian? Was I
seeing some funny, kind of dorky older man as hot because he was
new? Eventually, that novelty would wear off, especially if he
turned out to be a jerk about this. And I really, really wanted him
to not be a jerk.

I held up my hands and let them drop to my
lap. “So, now, you know what I mean about ‘going slow’. Like I
said, there won’t be any hard feelings if—”

“
Well, I don’t know if you
noticed last Sunday, but I’m a Catholic. Not having pre-marital sex
is something we’re supposed to be very good at.”

That was…unexpected. Maybe
because I wanted so badly for this to go forward, to really get to
know each other, I’d figured it was doomed. But he’d answered so
easily and quickly. He hadn’t asked if he could sleep on it and
call me if he decided he could
handle
the situation. He hadn’t made
some insulting attempt at humor about how he would
cure
me. He’d just
accepted my words at face value.

My eyebrows were never going to come down
from my hairline. “Oh. I kind of assumed that would be a
date-ender. It has been in the past.”